Harvest 2026 A time to think, reflect and create. Read the season and make the best possible wine that speaks of the vineyard, the season and me Fun, exciting, inspiring and creative. The excitement of harvest is invigorating, captivating and all consuming, like few other things. Wine, so much to know, so […]
Pegasus Bay: Two Decades of Craft Back in New Zealand, Pegasus Bay became home. I worked there for two decades, eventually becoming joint winemaker with Matthew Donaldson. Together we pushed boundaries, experimenting constantly to create wines with depth, complexity, and structure — wines that could stand confidently alongside the great wines of the world rather […]
A Life in Wine: 43 Vintages and Still Curious Wine has never been just a job for me. It has been a journey — a relentless pursuit of understanding how grapes, soil, climate, and human hands come together to create something extraordinary. Over the past 32 years I have worked 43 vintages across the world, […]
There were once 6, now there is just 1 I, Lynnette Hudson was always the winemaker and still am, but now I own the fabulous Tongue in Groove business. Life has its ups and downs, and with 6 people in the partnership there are constant changes and challenges. Relationships change, the aims and goals of […]
LITTLE STOMPER – Orange Wine 2023 When you foot stomp directly in barrels you need small feet to help you. Our families and friends provide no end of ‘little stompers’ to help. No surprise then the resulting wine is an amalgam of old and new knowledge. VINEYARD A small vineyard 83 Church Road, […]
We live in an extraordinary part of the world. We are less than thirty minutes from braided fishing rivers to both the north and the south. One of only three estuaries in our large region is about twenty minutes down the road. One of the most abundant and bountiful ocean spots in the […]
By September things were getting dire. Apples were so far past their best they just weren’t a pleasure to eat anymore. There are only so many oranges you can consume, and by the end of that month their shiny skins were giving way to a dull malleability. Kiwifruit? Done. Supermarket pineapples flown from […]
To be honest I didn’t know whether to write this blog post or not. I considered ‘chickening out’ more than once. Talking about eating meat is fraught in this day and age. It seems to cue an ardent type of anonymous social media vegan. The vegans I know personally accept our meat-eating ways and […]
I’m sure social media has changed foraging. In this super-connected world information that used to be passed along slowly, often by meeting your neighbor at the letterbox, is now distributed to a much wider community instantly. I love that there is still a code and etiquette about foraging information though. Very seldom are […]
I surprised myself by having a little cry in the shower on Sunday morning. It sort of came from nowhere, a mixture of complete joy and total relief after discovering 35mm of rain in the rain gauge. I didn’t realise until that moment just how significant rain, or lack thereof, had become. […]
